U.S. Presidential Campaigns Linked to More Biased Elections Abroad

Why This Question Matters

Johannes Bubeck, Ashrakat Elshehawy, Nikolay Marinov, and Federico Nanni investigate how the attention of a powerful liberal state—in this case the United States—shapes the quality of elections in other countries. The authors build on the idea of "attention costs": when great powers are busy with competing domestic priorities, they have less capacity to monitor, sanction, or otherwise deter electoral manipulation abroad. Understanding this mechanism matters for scholarship on democracy promotion and for policymakers who rely on diplomatic pressure to uphold electoral integrity.

Theory: How Attention Affects Cheating

The paper offers a formal game-theoretic model showing that higher attention costs for a supervising liberal power reduce the expected cost of cheating for incumbent governments in other states. When the supervising power cannot or does not focus resources on election oversight, incumbents face a smaller threat of international sanction or reputational punishment and therefore have greater incentive to bias electoral outcomes.

How the Authors Test the Theory

• The authors exploit temporal variation in U.S. political attention generated by the American election cycle: domestic campaigns raise policymakers' attention costs and constrain their capacity to focus abroad.
• They introduce a novel empirical measure of U.S. attention to foreign elections and construct an index of electoral bias to capture manipulation by incumbents in third countries.
• The empirical strategy links fluctuations in U.S. attention—particularly around presidential elections—to changes in observed bias in foreign elections, providing a real-world test of the model's predictions.

Key Findings

• The empirical evidence aligns with the theoretical model: periods when U.S. policymakers are occupied with their own presidential campaigns correspond to reduced attention to foreign elections.
• Those periods are associated with higher measured bias in elections abroad, consistent with incumbents taking advantage of the U.S. distraction.
• The authors also show that international pressure more generally can restrain cheating incumbents, suggesting supervision and sanction threats matter for electoral integrity.

Policy Implications and Next Steps

The results suggest democracy-promotion efforts depend on the attention capacity of liberal powers: when those powers are preoccupied, third-country incumbents can exploit the gap. The findings encourage policymakers and multilateral actors to consider institutionalized monitoring mechanisms that are less vulnerable to cyclical distractions, and invite further research on which forms of international pressure are most effective at deterring electoral manipulation.